They just got a different tool to use than we do: They kill innocent lives to achieve objectives. That's what they do. And they're good. They get on the TV screens and they get people to ask questions about, well, you know, this, that or the other. I mean, they're able to kind of say to people: Don't come and bother us, because we will kill you. Bush - Joint News Conference with Blair - 28 July '06

Monday, March 19, 2007

Iraq 4 years on: One third of children malnourished

Caritas Internationalis and Caritas Iraq say that malnutrition rates have risen in Iraq from 19 percent before the US-led invasion to a national average of 28 percent four years later.

Caritas says that rising hunger has been caused by high levels of insecurity, collapsed healthcare and other infrastructure, increased polarisation between different sects and tribes, and rising poverty.

Over 11 percent of newborn babies are born underweight in Iraq today, compared with a figure of 4 percent in 2003. Before March 2003, Iraq already had significant infant mortality due to malnutrition because of the international sanctions regime. Link

"War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere,
or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to
make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too
intelligent."George Orwell

Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship
in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to
establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object
of torture is torture. The object of power is power."George Orwell

The vanquished know war. They see through the empty jingoism of those who
use the abstract words of glory, honour, and patriotism to mask the cries of the
wounded, the senseless killing, war profiteering, and chest-pounding grief. They
know the lies the victors often do not acknowledge, the lies covered up in
stately war memorials and mythic war narratives, filled with stories of courage
and comradeship. They know the lies that permeate the thick, self-important
memoirs by amoral statesmen who make wars but do not know war. The vanquished
know the essence of war - death. They grasp that war is necrophilia. They see
that war is a state of almost pure sin with its goals of hatred and destruction.
They know how war fosters alienation, leads inevitably to nihilism, and is a
turning away from the sanctity and preservation of life. All other narratives
about war too easily fall prey to the allure and seductiveness of violence, as
well as the attraction of the godlike power that comes with the license to kill
with impunity. But the words of the vanquished come later, sometimes long after
the war, when grown men and women unpack the suffering they endured as children,
what it was like to see their mother or father killed or taken away, or what it
was like to lose their homes, their community, their security, and be discarded
as human refuse. But by then few listen. The truth about war comes out, but
usually too late. We are assured by the war-makers that these stories have no
bearing on the glorious violent enterprise the nation is about to inaugurate.
And, lapping up the myth of war and its sense of empowerment, we prefer not to
look.Chris Hedges

Armaments bring only disasters. When one accumulates them, this damages
the economy, and if one puts them to use, then they destroy people on both
sides. Consequently, only a madman can believe that armaments are the principal
means in the life of society. No, they are an enforced loss of human energy, and
what is more are for the destruction of man himself. If people do not show
wisdom, then in the final analysis they will come to a clash, like blind moles,
and then reciprocal extermination will begin.Khrushchev to Kennedy

contact: oxe1ATyandex.com

Disobedience is the foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.
[Henry David Thoreau]